When the Roof Comes Off: Sukkos in an Age of Economic Anxiety

For much of this past year, Americans have absorbed a confusing story about their own economic security. The 10-year Treasury yield, what the U.S. government itself pays to borrow, has hovered near 5%, reaching 5.009% in mid-September 2026, up from 4.28% a year earlier. Overall inflation has held stubbornly around 3.4%, well above the Fed's target, driven largely by energy costs that are up double digits year over year. Within that broader picture, observant Jewish families are absorbing something sharper still: kosher food businesses report that their narrow pool of specialty suppliers, combined with tariffs and an ongoing meat shortage, has amplified price increases far beyond the general grocery rate—even as nationwide grocery inflation sits near 2%. Keeping a kosher home, already a more expensive proposition than the general market, has gotten more expensive, faster. For a country that has spent eighty years building the most materially secure Jewish community in our history, this feels unfamiliar: the ground beneath the house is not as solid as it looked. Which is exactly what Sukkos wants us to feel. The Mitzvah of Sukkah itself is jarring. The precise language the Torah uses to describe our Sukkah experience is teishvu, or dwell. The language is precise, and it is clear that the Sukkah is not supposed to be just visited. The Mitzvah is for us to now dwell in a temporary structure for seven days and be subject to all the whims of the weather season. The Mishna rules that the sukkah's covering, known as Schach, must not be unfit for ordinary construction and must be built from natural overgrowth and not good construction material. The point is that no one could mistake it for permanent shelter. If that undermines our sense of security, that is the point. The Talmud records a dispute about what the sukkah recalls: R' Eliezer says literal huts our ancestors built in the desert; R' Akiva says the ananei kavod, the Clouds of Glory that surrounded and fed them. Either way, the sukkah commemorates something we did not build and could not have sustained ourselves, our homes, or our tables. The Zohar calls it tzila d'mehemnusa, "the shade of faith." The sukkah isn't shelter from weather; it's a structure whose whole function is to teach that the roof, and the food beneath it, were never really ours to secure alone. ​ This isn't a call to indifference toward earning a living. It’s important to distinguish between faith and passivity. Trust in G-d doesn't replace the effort to earn a livelihood. Faith displaces the illusion that we personally engineered our comfort. It’s an illusion easiest to hold when the grocery bill is predictable, harder when yields are near 5%, and the kosher aisle keeps outpacing the rest of the store. King Solomon authored the sobering Koheles, and in it we learn about the unsparing catalog of how wealth dissolves into vanity.It is read specifically on Sukkos. Sitting exposed in a temporary hut enacts its conclusion after all the accumulation; what remains is faith in G-d and fidelity to the mitzvos. ​ A year of rising yields, rising energy costs, and an even steeper kosher grocery bill is a fair occasion to ask Koheles question honestly: what in our sense of security was ever really ours? Sukkos gives us seven days sitting in a structure that cannot lie to us about the answer, then sends us back to our tables at home, still remembering what we felt outside them. Have a Peaceful Shabbos and Sukkos, Rabbi Yaakov Fisch